question on titles

[amythepoet]

Hi

I'm trying to come up with a great title for the search engines and just want to know if you would use the word "BUY" in the title

Let's say , I am selling widgets. Should the title be

Buy custom widgets

Or say

Widgets for hardware stores, major appliance stores

something like that?

Thanks

[ridlan]

Hi,

From my own experience in Web pages optimization:

Ask yourself if you would use the word BUY when querying a search engine in the context in which you are thinking to use it.

Rafa

[edited by: engine at 7:45 am (utc) on Aug. 19, 2004]
[edit reason] No sigs, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[ppg]

I think you need to look at tiles from both a users perspective (you want to entice the click), and from an optimisation perspective.

It depends on what keyphrase the page is targetting.

Your title should reflect the keywords you're looking for traffic on. If you want to add a call to action to entice the click then the meta description can be a good place for that, since the weighting for ranking purposes is less.

Say you have a page with price comparison info on custom widgets, your title might be something like 'Custom Widgets: find a custom widget online' (covering the singular and plural) and your description could be weighted more towards enticing the click. Something like 'Custom widgets - compare prices on hundreds of widgets etc etc' so the call to action reflects what the user can do on that page.

I find it interesting that people will put great consideration into say the creative for a PPC ad, but pretty much stick up any old description.

If the phrase 'compare prices...' is pulling clicks on PPC ads, then why not include it in your description or your title too - surely this is just as valuable piece of SERP real estate as a PPC ad if it gets displayed, if not more so.